Debacle on Thirty-Fourth
Street
Last week I heard that Macy’s department store in New York
City has decided to drop its traditional “Merry Christmas” greetings, hitherto
posted everywhere in the store during the weeks leading up to December 25. They
are replacing “Merry Christmas” with “Happy Holidays,” a blandly ecumenical
slogan that has always made me want to barf. It’s kind of like saying, “This
week, worship at the golf course of your choice.”
“Happy
Holidays” affirms nothing. Whenever anyone, an individual, an institution, a
greeting card, says it, all they are saying is, “I’m no longer wishing you a
Merry Christmas.” It is all negation, albeit timid, gutless, and euphemistic
negation.
Oh, I know
the drill, the ACLU catechism: “If we have public expressions of one particular
faith, members of other faiths will feel left out.” That is nonsense. There is
no reason the government should not facilitate the celebration of an occasion
that is part of its citizen’s culture. Naturally, Christians being in the
majority, there are going to be more manger scenes than menorahs on display.
But the thing to do is to provide
multicultural education by publicly taking note of the major holidays of other
now-American religions, too, such as the Jewish Hanukah and the Islamic
Ramadan.
Indeed, this alternative is so
obvious that one cannot help suspecting that the ACLU really doesn’t give a
righteously indignant darn about the sensibilities of the religious minorities.
In fact, if the ACLU has their way, the turn of the Muslims, Jews, Hindus, and
Buddhists will come! In the end, the ACLU will work to outlaw expressions of their faiths, too.
For their real agenda is a
secularistic state. Forgive me for seeming to split hairs here, but there is a
mile-wide difference between the concepts of a secular state and of a secularistic
one. The difference is that between the USA
and the old USSR.
We live in a society wherein no single
religion is the official party line. That is a “secular” state. There is no
single state religion, and all religions may flourish freely.
But in the Soviet Union,
all religion was suppressed, allowed to exist under only the most repressive
restrictions. The USSR
was a state with an anti-religious party
line. That is a “secularistic” state, and I believe that is the
not-so-hidden agenda of the ACLU as well as Americans United for Separation of
Church and State. The only raw-nerved minority the ACLU and AUSCS are lobbying
for is themselves: secularists and atheists.
Now Macy’s has fallen in line with
secularist propaganda.
And here we find a rich yet
revolting irony. Remember the Christmas classic (or should I say “holiday
classic”? No.) Miracle on 34th Street?
Santa Claus comes down from the North Pole a bit earlier than usual to conduct
an experiment. Like the angels checking out the ill rumors about Sodom,
Kris Kringle has come to New York City
to see if Christmas has utterly succumbed to commercialism, cynicism and
unbelief.
He takes as the focus of his
efforts Doris Walker and her daughter Susie, neither of whom believes in Santa
Claus or much of anything else. The mother has been disillusioned in love and
dares not take a leap of faith on any other matter. She has raised her daughter
to be a strict rationalist with as little tolerance for having fun as for
superstitious belief.
Kris Kringle’s path crosses theirs,
because he takes a job as Macy’s department store Santa, and Doris
works there. He insists he is the one true Santa Claus and forewarns Doris
right up front that he means to make converts of her and her daughter. They are
a test case for him, and if he cannot bring them out of the secular-materialist
torpor that lies thick over the modern landscape, then “Christmas and I are
finished.”
Kris’s crisis comes when the
sour-pussed Mr. Sawyer, the quack industrial psychologist at Macy’s, diagnoses him
as a madman, despite his wholesome effects on the store and its way of doing
business. Kris is taken away to the insane asylum. But in a trial culminating
on Christmas Eve, he is vindicated: all those whom he has helped simply cannot
believe he is just crazy, so they decide he must in fact be Santa! Mr. Sawyer is denounced by R.H. Macy and fired on the
spot. The Scroogism he represents is sent packing.
But now, in 2004, it is back! It
appears that the peevish Mr. Sawyer has returned to Macy’s and is now running
the show. Turns out that he was only temporarily defeated, made a strategic
retreat, and has counter-attacked. He has gotten his way in the midst of Kris
Kringle’s stronghold, Macy’s department store. And the rest of us have been
caught sadly unprepared, complacent.
One can only hope that Macy’s CEO
will find himself haunted in the wee hours by R.H. Macy in the role of the
Ghost of Christmas Past. But there will be no need for any elaborate and
time-consuming spirit journeys like the ones Ebenezer Scrooge embarked on. All
the Ghost of Macy needs to do is hand his successor a DVD of Miracle on 34th Street. That
ought to do it.